


a little evil goes a long, long way

by ashers_kiss



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: (just in case), Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Flirting, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Injury, Minor pairings - Freeform, Non-Explicit Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 21:11:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5020678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashers_kiss/pseuds/ashers_kiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I had thought,</i> she writes, and refuses to concern herself with how eager she must appear, hunched over the paper, <i>we could continue our previous conversation.  You are so quick to proclaim me incapable of emotion, and yet your encounters with the real me have been rather limited.</i></p><p>Joan returns with, <i>All right, I’ll bite</i>.</p><p>Or:  five times Jamie Moriarty tried to convince Joan Watson to be her friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a little evil goes a long, long way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Madame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madame/gifts).



> For [Madame](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Madame) as part of [femslashex 2015](http://femslashex.dreamwidth.org/).
> 
> Going to try and keep this short, given the anon period. Huge, _huge_ thanks and love to S for all her support - this would not have existed without her - or [the mix](http://solitaryshadowdancer.tumblr.com/post/83851683484/thatgirlisaproblem) she recommended! ♥♥♥
> 
> [Madame](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Madame), I hope you enjoy this. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I still feel like it could have been better.
> 
> Takes place after s2ep12, and kind of works as an AU of s2 from that point on.
> 
> Warnings for someone getting shot, and for references to the accidental harm Moriarty caused herself in s2ep12. Also for the attitudes of assholes to women and people of colour.
> 
> Title from [Daughters of Darkness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XQ1FB3Rz0g) by Halestorm and yes, is totally a reference to the "little bit evil" line.

1.

“You have a visitor,” Mattoo says. (Honestly, Jamie was rather amazed they hadn’t replaced him. Especially considering the bruises still purpling his throat in a dark, twisted line. But he had merely shrugged when she mentioned it. “You were protecting your daughter.” He met her eyes, and Jamie felt her spine stiffen. “I understand that. I respect that. I won’t take it personally. But do it again, and I just might.” Their gazes held, even as Jamie inclined her head. And so Mattoo remains.)

Jamie doesn’t roll her eyes, but she is not exactly quick to put down her paper. Right now she cannot summon the energy to deal with more of Sherlock’s talk of morality. She had quite enough while she was bleeding out, thank you.

Instead, it’s Joan who steps into her room, and Jamie lets a raised eyebrow be the only sign of her surprise.

She looks as well as ever, and as smartly dressed. It does not do, after all, to confront someone one considers a mortal enemy, wearing anything less than one’s best. Jamie understands fashion as an armour, as a weapon, perhaps better than anyone. 

Joan remains by the window, and takes a moment to look around. Very little has changed – Jamie’s painting time has been somewhat…lacking, of late – and Joan appears as disinterested as she last did. She points to her portrait, lifts her own eyebrows. “Really? Still?” Jamie shrugs, languid, and settles herself more firmly into the corner of her couch.

“It’s my best work. Well, one of them. The other is somewhere on display in Italy, I believe.” She smiles, something quick and sharp. “But I doubt you came here to discuss art.”

It is not what Jamie would call a laugh, but Joan does take a step closer. Jamie is far from stupid enough to believe her lowered head is a sign of acquiescence.

“Sherlock’s going to keep writing you, but he won’t be coming here again.” Rather the opposite, it would appear.

“And you?” Jamie leans forward, crossing her arms over her lap so her hands dangle. The movement pulls her sleeves ever so slightly, but her wrists remain covered. “Will you visit me again?”

The smile Joan gives her barely exists, but is as dangerous as she knows her own to be. Something sharp swoops in her chest, her stomach, too close to something she has known before and yet vastly different. “I never did,” Joan says, and turns on her heel. Jamie waits until the door closes behind her to sit back.

*

2.

“I want to write a letter,” Jamie says, once Mattoo steps inside. She tilts her head, narrows her eyes at the blue that is still not quite the right shade, and hears the head duck of a silent laugh in his voice.

“You already wrote to Mr Holmes this morning.”

She does turn then, gives him her sweetest, most knowing smile, the one she practiced in the dormitories and perfected in lecture theatres. He remains distinctly unimpressed, and Jamie almost misses the days when the people around her were in awe. “I want to write another letter.”

“I had gathered that,” he says, at that same insufferably patient pace. It itches between Jamie’s shoulder blades, a spot she cannot shrug away. “You know the agreement. One letter to Mr Holmes a day.”

It almost feels as if she’s swallowed something whole, lodged just shy of painfully in her throat. “To someone _other_ than Sherlock.”

Mattoo reacts to _that_ , at least. The quick, aborted twist of his head, his jaw jutting even as he pretends it never occurred. The eyebrow that rises, and stays there. “You know what that means.” The words that sit less than an octave higher than they normally would, too much surprise to be a reprimand. Jamie lets her smile curve and her hair slide over her shoulder. It has no effect on him, of course, but it doesn’t do to let all that practice go to waste.

“I dare say that I do.”

Later, when she has sold off another piece of her soul (nothing quite so dramatic, and quite honestly, she had been meaning to take care of that particular thorn in her side when she was released. Personal satisfaction is a small price to pay to have the matter taken off her hands, really), Mattoo finally brings her pen and paper, and sits himself at her easel to wait. (She’s never left alone for this; apparently the pen is a common method of suicide, which the American government has decided she now has a history of, after the glass. Refusing to see the detail has made America one of the most ruthlessly wealthy countries in the world; lack of ability to see the big picture will be what ruins it, eventually.)

And for some reason, she finds herself…halted. The words always flow so easily with Sherlock, as if he were here in the room with her, insistent and irritating and emphatic, passionate, and always so _clever_. Her hand fights to keep up with her brain, to keep from a scrawl she would have once been scolded for and would have been illegible to even herself.

But now…now Jamie hesitates. She glares up at Mattoo, as if it is his fault (oh, but if only he would leave her _alone_ , a corner of her mind whispers, silky as her very best seduction). His smile is as infuriating as her block.

“Stuck?”

“No,” Jamie snarls. Of _course_ not.

Eventually, all she writes is, _I surrendered the most delicious opportunity in order to be allowed this letter, and yet I cannot think of a single thing to say. How curious._ Mattoo does her the decency of not laughing as he reads over it, but there is something that irritates at the back of her mind, scratching, that lingers into the night, even after yoga. (She _longs_ for a good boxing session, but no, that would be _much_ too violent an allowance. God _forbid_ she take the notion to beat anyone to death, or anything else quite so ridiculous.)

Joan’s reply, when it comes two days later, is a bare handful of words – _Why are you writing to me?_ – but it eases something under Jamie’s skin, behind her lungs.

 _I had thought,_ she writes, and refuses to concern herself with how eager she must appear, hunched over the paper, _we could continue our previous conversation. You are so quick to proclaim me incapable of emotion, and yet your encounters with the real me have been rather limited._

Joan returns with, _All right, I’ll bite_ , before launching into a rather scathing critique of Jamie’s ability to love, and Jamie doesn’t bother to hide her smile.

Oh, she does so enjoy her exchanges with Sherlock, with someone who can match her on the grand schemes of the universe, ridiculously lofty as it sounds. But where Sherlock has a penchant for more…expressive language, for the esoteric and the obscure, Joan cuts straight to the heart of the matter, with such little fuss – Jamie quite enjoys the image conjured, of her wielding her scalpel in much the same way. There is something so _direct_ about Joan, how she views the world, how she talks; it’s rather refreshing, Jamie decides, rereading, her own response formulating her head.

Refreshing, and, most importantly, entirely independent of Sherlock’s own process. It would appear that Jamie was wrong ( _again_ , a small, amused voice whispers. It would sound like Joan, Jamie thinks, if she were a more fanciful person) – Joan Watson clearly craves no one’s attention, least of all Sherlock’s.

Indeed, it is perhaps Jamie who has begun to crave…

*

3.

So far, Jamie has managed to avoid being shot. She has been cut, of course, and on one memorable occasion, stabbed. But she has never been shot.

Until now, that is.

She does not recommend the experience. It bloody _hurts_.

Her vision is…unsteady, what passes for the night sky in New York swimming in and out of focus; it feels like it requires far too much energy to open her eyes again after blinking them closed. She blames that for the fact she feels the cool hand against her throat before she sees Joan’s face above hers.

“Hey.” Joan is frowning, Jamie realises, once she focuses. She must be annoyed. Jamie would be annoyed too, if she had to kneel on the wet pavement and ruin her lovely cream coat. As it is, Jamie rather regrets wearing her favourite shirt for this particular outing. (But she suits the purple so _well_.) “Moriarty, hey. Stay with me, okay? The ambulance’ll be here soon.”

And Jaime knows it’s worrying, that she can no longer feel the cold of the ground through her own coat. That while every part of her _aches_ , the sharp pain of her chest seems curiously distant, even with Joan’s expert pressure. But she can feel Joan’s fingers at her pulse, and the smile curving her own mouth. It is enough, she thinks.

“You really should call me Jamie,” she means to say, but the bright lights of New York are sliding away even without closing her eyes, and whatever Joan is saying now, she sounds almost _urgent_.

I shall have to buy her a new coat, Jamie thinks, before the lights disappear completely.

*

4.

Detective Bell is a good sort, Jamie thinks. If one is into that sort of thing. It all sounds rather dull to her.

She watches him take in her room, lingering by the door. Watches him with Sherlock, their heads together and the casually exasperated look he gives at whatever it is Sherlock says. (Clever, _frustrating_ Sherlock, with his back angled _just_ enough that she can’t read his lips.) Clearly, Sherlock _is_ into that.

She shouldn’t be surprised, really. She created Irene to fulfil several needs.

She’s quite abruptly distracted when Joan sits herself on the other end of her couch. “You look utterly thrilled to be _here_ , I must say,” Jamie tells her, putting down her book.

Joan starts tugging off her gloves, practiced movement sharp and quick, and Jamie finds her eyes lingering. “Well it’s just such a welcoming environment.” She looks up, and she’s smiling. Just slightly, almost as if she’s sharing a joke. Or a _secret_. It makes Jamie want to lean in, be closer. Share in that secret. “You know, don’t you?”

Jamie wants to share in other people’s secrets. She collects them, almost a hobby – she _hoards_ them, mines them for the information they’re worth, for the sheer _pleasure_ of knowing. She does not share. Her hair, longer now, brushes her throat as she tilts her head. “Know what?” she asks, with only a touch of the wide eyes that have gotten her away with so, so much.

Joan’s smile dies, and the light behind her eyes disappears as her expression…shutters, for want of a better word. She sits back, as if to push herself to her feet, and something catches in Jamie’s chest.

“I know,” she says, turning to face Joan fully, tucking her legs up underneath herself as she leans in, “that they are currently standing at _least_ two inches closer than they were willing to the last time I encountered Detective Bell while conscious.” Joan settles herself back against the cushions, but she remains impassive, and the word continue to tumble from Jamie’s mouth in a manner disturbingly similar to Sherlock himself. “I know that last time, it was Sherlock he went to first, despite the fact that I was the one who had been shot and you were covered in blood.” He had only stopped for a moment, according to the gossiping officers, but it was enough. “I know that Sherlock only holds himself so _firmly_ when he wants to reach out and touch, and knows he shouldn’t. And I know Bell continues to look at the back of Sherlock’s head when he thinks no one is watching, in a way I can only describe as _fond_.”

She has been pointing, she realises, and pulls her hand up to tuck into her hair. “Did they honestly think they were being _subtle_?”

“We were trying, yeah,” Detective Bell snaps from where he now stands, behind the couch, and neither of them jump, but Jamie allows her estimation of him to increase a few, minor, notches. She tips her head back and smiles at him, the one she designed to send good boys like him running for their mothers.

“Detective Bell,” she purrs. “So _good_ to see you again.” None of them have raised their voices above a level designed to give a modicum of decency, none of his many colleagues currently swarming her room heard any of the discussion. But now a few of them are starting to look – including Sherlock, she now notes, from his conversation with Mattoo and the Captain by the window.

Bell is clearly, clearly going to say something, and Jamie lets him see the smile for what it truly is – a bearing of teeth. A warning. I will eat you whole, she thinks.

Then Joan turns, her hand reaching over the back of the couch to settle on his arm, and once again, Jamie finds her attention transfixed. “I got this, Marcus,” she says, and she sounds so _sincere_ , it hurts Jamie’s teeth. Something burns in her throat as she watches that touch, the look they exchange before Bell withdraws, glaring a warning of his own at Jamie as he goes. (Later, when the burning has receded and she is alone again, Jamie raises him a few more notches.)

She is expecting Joan’s reprimand, lifts her chin to it. But Joan only smiles – something more obvious, and somehow less heartfelt, than the last. “How’s the wound doing?”

As if on cue, the stitched together hole in her chest twinges, and Jamie forces herself to shrug through it. “It’s not every day one gets shot.”

“No. Let’s maybe try and keep it that way.” A hand on her arm, _Joan’s_ hand, cool to the touch and squeezing lightly. Not a warning. Jamie dare not look up, lest it disappear. “They really are trying to keep it quiet,” Joan says, and there is nothing but gravel in Jamie’s mouth.

She looks up and meets Joan’s eyes – they are so _dark_ , Jamie refuses to let her head swim, to be lost – and swallows. “I’m sure an arrangement can be made,” she says, but it is…soft, lacking, and Joan sits back with something that could almost be a laugh, if Jamie strained her ears enough.

When the attempted thieves return the next night – home-grown terrorists, rednecks, as Jamie had concluded and Sherlock announced – they catch Mattoo locking her in for the night and, on finding no secret government weapons cache, decide to have a little “fun”. Jamie kills the one who pistol whips Mattoo so hard he bleeds, and the one who suggests she could make up for their lost guns. She breaks the spines of the ones who use such vile words about him, but she leaves the rest alive and whole, if in slightly more pain than when they first arrived. (She takes a great amount of joy in breaking the ringleader’s nose.)

*

5.

“Joan!” Jamie isn’t quite sure what time it is, but clearly too early considering Joan’s unimpressed groan at her greeting.

“How the hell did you get this number?” She sounds scratchy from sleep, and there is so much going on, so much to _do_ , Jamie’s pulse is already thrumming in her ears, under her scars, but –

“I’m being moved,” she says, quite cheerfully, and turns to watch them carry out more canvases.

“Oh.” Joan sounds much _more_ awake now, which is somewhat gratifying. There’s a rustle, the sound of a body moving through sheets, and Jamie spins, walks to where her couch once sat. Her heels are loud on the now-bare concrete. “Isn’t this the kind of thing you should be telling your lawyer?”

Jamie huffs. “Oh, she’ll be informed through the usual channels, I imagine. But I thought – ” She pauses. “I thought I should inform you both there will be a halt to our conversations. I dare say they will be continued at a later date.”

“Right.” _That_ is the Joan she knows, so utterly unimpressed by anything she does. “So now I’m your carrier pigeon.”

“Never a pigeon, darling,” Jamie says. She can feel the smile building at the corners of her mouth, and that just won’t do, surrounded by so many strangers. “Must dash, Joanie. All my best to Sherlock and his detective – well, maybe not _all_ , they probably wouldn’t believe it.”

“Wait – ”

But Jamie has already hung up, passing Mattoo the phone and eyeing her new…entourage. Most of them have the sense to look away.

*

+1.

New York in spring really is quite pretty, Jamie thinks. There’s still a chill in the air, leaving her to bury her hands in the pockets of her new jacket, but the sky is practically cloudless, and the smell of the carefully lined trees and flora almost entirely mask the smell of the river. (She can always, always smell that bloody river. And she grew up next to the _Thames_.)

She could almost understand how anyone could stand to live here, she decides, before the door opens and Joan stands in front of her, dressed in what are clearly exercise clothes, face shining as she pushes damp hair from her face. “If you forgot your keys you could ju – oh.” Joan stops, and Jamie has to swallow the dust and dirt that has reappeared in her mouth.

She smiles, dazzling, and spreads her hands, still in her pockets. It does involve showing off her outfit, the scarlet of her shirt, the drape of the material, but if she had aimed to be _entirely_ subtle, she wouldn’t have worn this shirt in the first place. “I did say we would continue our conversation.”

“At a later date,” Joan repeats. She seems quite…struck, and Jamie has never seen the appeal in such overused clichés, but she looks like nothing but a small woodland animal caught in headlights. “You’re out.”

“Should I have sent a card?”

The look Joan gives her is so familiar, it settles under Jamie’s skin as something she almost hadn’t realised she’d missed. “You’d better come in,” Joan says, stepping aside, and Jamie has been in this building many times, but it seems…different.

Perhaps it is just her.

Joan slips past her, moving far more easily in the space than she ever did when Jamie was last here. “You want coffee?” she calls over her shoulder, and Jamie has to look away from the bare length of her legs before she can answer.

“Tea, I think.” It is _definitely_ different. The space is no longer wholly Sherlock’s, not even the majority; it is _shared_. She recognises books Sherlock would have little to no interest in, a knitted throw folded at the end of the couch. Glasses, a sensibly fashionable style Sherlock would be too vain to ever admit he needed, and multiple areas clear of chaos. The padlocks are still there, though, and Clyde in his enclosure.

She also notes the practice dummy, which is not so unusual, but the gloves tossed at its feet are new. “You box?” she asks, and does not bother keeping the delight from her voice.

“Yoga just wasn’t cutting it today,” Joan says, closer than Jamie anticipated, and she turns to find her leaning against the doorway to the kitchen. And she’s _smiling_. “Sherlock’s on a case right now, but I can let him know you’re here.”

Jamie inclines her head, brings back just some of her smile, enough to match Joan’s own. “Who says I came to see Sherlock?”

“Really.” Joan pushes off from the frame, moving towards her, and something curious and tight is happening to Jamie’s chest. “So it was our conversation you wanted to restart.”

Jamie has a few scant inches on her, and when Joan stops in front of her, she’s so close Jamie has to look _down_. “Perhaps,” she manages.

“Jamie,” Joan says, and Jamie’s breath dies in her throat even before Joan takes hold of the open edges of her jacket to pull her in. “Stop it now.” Jamie does, but only because Joan kisses her, and Jamie will be _damned_ if she misses a moment of that.

(All right, she will admit – if only because Joan will never let her _forget_ – that for a mere split second, she almost forgets to react, to kiss _back_. But then Joan nips at her bottom lip, and Jamie is not slow in making up for lost time, so much so Joan laughs into the kiss, and for one insane moment Jamie thinks she would kiss her _forever_ if that was the result.)

Joan is – determined, certainly. Once she’s gotten Jamie out of her jacket, she all but _drags_ her up the stairs, and they lose an entire afternoon, and most of the evening. Joan’s mouth is a wicked, _wicked_ thing, taking Jamie apart repeatedly, and putting her back together again so she feels brand new. Joan is _methodical_ , meticulous, and Jamie could have expected no less, but it is one thing to know it, and another completely to have her wrists pinned above her head as Joan grins down at her.

Not that Jamie doesn’t give _just_ as good as she gets – there are marks sucked and bitten into Joan’s throat, along her shoulders (one of them above collar-height, which Jamie is particularly proud of and pays special attention to, despite Joan batting her away), bruises pressed into her hips. She learns all about the inside of Joan’s knee, her hipbone, how a mere brush of lips make her eyes flutter and her bones melt, how a hand in her hair makes her eyes snap fire and a kiss behind her ear makes her sigh.

And oh, her _smile_. Her true smile, only ever hinted at before – it’s like sunshine, Jamie thinks, and delights in drawing it out again and again, constantly. She would kill for that smile.

Later, when the sun has long set and they are finally, finally sated (for now, Jamie promises herself, and presses a kiss to Joan’s shoulder blade), she offers to find food. Joan moans (perhaps not _entirely_ sated, given the tug in Jamie’s belly), says, “Sleeeeeeep,” and grumbles something into her pillow about geniuses being so _stupid_. Jamie grins – she looks ridiculous, she _must_ , she can’t stop – and pulls on a shirt from the pile of clothes they left on the chair.

While the day has been rather satisfactory in ways she could not have hoped for, full of wonders and surprises (the beautiful noises Joan makes, the arch of her back as she comes, the sleepiness of her smile), Jamie would be remiss if she said Sherlock’s yelp as she descended the stairs in only Joan’s raggedy, thin t-shirt was not a highlight.

*

(“You _told_ me to go out and find someone!”

“Yes, but _not her_.”

Jamie tries very, very to hide what she knows is a smug smile behind her tea. Truly she does. Detective Bell just puts his head in his hands.

“Well _tough_.”)


End file.
